Tattoo

by Michelle Rene

  Sure enough, the reporters caught wind of Jane’s incarceration, and before you knew it, her picture was plastered all over the evening news. You couldn’t watch a show or scroll through a newsfeed without seeing it, and I was her lawyer. My name accompanied her photo wherever it went.

  The next day, a bedraggled Dakota came bulldozing her way into my office with a new hairdo. She had dyed it green and cut it short, with one side completely shaven. A new coif of bangs hid her unfortunate new label.

  “Ms. Dakota. May I help you?”

  “You are her lawyer?”

  “Please be more specific. I am a lot of people’s lawyer.”

  “Don’t play dumb fuck with me, Elliot. You are Jane’s lawyer.”

  “Yes, I am, and you are her mysterious tattoo artist who tried to give her a legitimate past.”

  Dakota looked as if I had shot her in the chest. Panic swept over her face. “She— She mentioned me?”

  “Not by name, so get your hackles down. I guessed as much. But no worries there. No one is looking to prosecute you for something we don’t even have proof of. All the tattooing you did is gone,” I said, lowering my voice.

  “It’s all gone? Every bit of it?”

  “Yes. There is no proof that you did anything illegal.”

  “Well, there is if you read my ribcage.”

  “Then I suggest, as your attorney, to not take your shirt off in public.”

  Dakota gave me a look that spoke volumes, and the first word of those volumes would have been a proper “fuck you.”

  “So, what do we do?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To get her out of prison,” she said exasperated. “She doesn’t belong there.”

  “I know she doesn’t, and you know she doesn’t, but do they?”

  I pointed to the flat television glass mounted on my wall. The throngs of crazy people camped outside city hall and the courthouse were getting even thicker than the night before. It was a terrifying mixture of crazy zealots, curious onlookers, and violent psychopaths.

  “What is she charged with?”

  “The crime of being unmarked and thus, unable to live as a contributing member of society. Trumped-up charges that never existed until now, I know, but they are afraid of her. No one knows what to do with a permanently unmarked girl.”

  “Well, what are you going to do to get her out? What’s the angle?”

  I sighed. This was the crux of the matter, was it not?

  “I don’t know yet. I’m trying to think of something.”

  “I’ll testify,” she blurted. “I’ll tell everyone what I tried to do. It will prove she really doesn’t remember anything.”

  “That won’t help our cause. It will only prove that she can’t ever be marked, which means we will never be able to re-introduce her into society if we cannot trace her misdeeds. Plus, it will most certainly call attention to your ribcage and put you in jail for a very long time.”

  Dakota’s brow furrowed, and she bit her lip. Tension radiated from her body. It was an emotion I was unaccustomed to seeing in the tattooist. Dakota’s nature, or at least the one she showed the world, was that of quiet calm, the pierced Buddha. It’s the demeanor you wanted to see in a tattooist or doctor or lawyer. Right then, she was positively leaking anxiety onto my faux Persian rug.

  “Why do you care so much?” I asked her abruptly.

  She looked at me with stones for eyes—stones that burrowed into my head but had the good grace to say nothing about what they found there.

  “Why do you?” she asked.

  “Because...”

  “Because you met her,” she answered for me.

  I thought about that for a second. Yes, I had met the girl. Hadn’t my whole mission changed after that initial meeting? That sweet, innocent girl and her peculiar ailment had frightened me at first, but after, all I felt was fear for her. For what people might do out of their own fear. I pondered my near-immediate instinct to protect her. Not only me but the hard-nosed guard too. That same look danced behind Dakota’s eyes as well.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I met her.”

  “Then there’s no point explaining our motives here. I want to help.”

  “I’m not sure how you can. Look, I can’t discuss more of the case with you than is in the newspapers. However, if I find a way to utilize you and not put you in jail, I will. Okay?”

  She eyed me warily, trying to decide if this was legitimate or just a ruse to get her out of there. Whatever her conclusion was, she didn’t share it with me. Dakota merely nodded toward me and left my office with nothing but the memory of her short skirt in her wake. Relieved, I exhaled audibly to no one but myself. My yoga instructor had said it was healthy or something.

  During the next weeks, I pored over ancient volumes of law text. Some were older than the judgment day itself. If you had asked me what I was searching for, I couldn’t have told you. Anything, I supposed—a precedent, a trial, a freaking haiku. Anything to make the charges against the kid go away. Failure to be marked. In other words, resistance to the status quo. Or in better terms, we are fucking afraid of you because you are anonymous. You have no accountability to the things you do accept to yourself, and we don’t know how to handle that.

  My one terrible brick wall came from the judicial commandments set in figurative stone after judgment day changed everything.

  Every citizen is and always will be marked with their deeds.

  A citizen’s marks are sacred and inscrutable.

  The markings are the basis on which a citizen is judged.

  To alter a citizen’s markings is illegal and immoral.

  How would I possibly get around this? But also, how could a person such as Jane help her situation? It was obvious she never had tattoos. She tried to get a life written for her and it didn’t take. Must she suffer for this?

  When the prosecuting attorney was assigned, I breathed a little sigh of relief. For weeks I had been dreading this news, hoping it wasn’t Rebecca. She and I had a sketchy past in the most sugar coated of scenarios. Robert Willhelm was going to prosecute, and he and I had a good ole boy camaraderie. There was some wiggle room with Willhelm in all this. I called his number and asked him out for a drink.

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Elliot.” Willhelm’s voice was standoffish and strained.

  The organ inside me that drove my intuition fell deep into my stomach, belly up so to speak. I clenched my teeth. “What? We can’t meet at Zepplins for a round and discuss the case? Come on. I’ll buy you that drink you like. The one that tastes like sadness.”

  “Moscato. It doesn’t taste like...look...I’m sorry, Elliot, but I just can’t.”

  “Moscato, that’s the stuff. Come on, we can’t meet at Zepplins for a round and discuss the case? I’ll buy you a glass of Mosc-sadness or whatever.”

  “Really, I can’t.”

  He was serious. No joking in there at all. I began to tense throughout my shoulders.

  “Gloves off, Robert. What’s going on here? I mean, I know it’s high profile, but...”

  “Look, Elliot, I’m really sorry they put you up to this one. It was a real shitty thing of Taylor to do. Maybe he didn’t know the score, and that’s why he asked you. I don’t know. Either way, just shut off the switch and look the other way.”

  “Shut off the switch? What are you telling me here?”

  “I’m saying don’t care about this one. You won’t win it.”

  He wasn’t blustering. There was no room in his tone for it. This was straight truth, and it frightened us both. Still, I had to try.

  “Well, you’re talking awfully cocky. I mean, Taylor will be presiding over the case, and he’s got a soft spot—”

  “Taylor’s not the judge anymore,” he said.

  “What? Since when?”

  “Since the capital got wind of this. They appointed someone else. Listen man, I’m telling you. It won’t matter what you say or do. This girl is going to prison fo
r the rest of her life, and there’s no way to stop it. You didn’t hear this from me, but the powers that be are making sure of this one. I’m sorry you’re the one on the hook. Really.”

  My jaw was slack. Somewhere in the hallway, I smelled the tangy scent of disinfectant. I looked at my watch and judged that I was one of the only people still working in the building except for the cleaning crew. I tried to say more to Robert, but my mouth was all dry. The words he fed me had been salty and wouldn’t wash down right.

  He hung up with me after a hasty farewell. I mouthed something back at him, but he was already gone. The idea that the whole thing was doomed filled me like a specter. The ghost of the inevitability of it all haunted everything I did. I was the walking doomed, moving about my life knowing exactly when the other shoe would drop and how and why. What more was there to do?

  The day before the trial, I went to visit Jane in solitary. Well, I didn’t so much as my ghost did. I was wrecked. Sleep hadn’t really been a friend of mine in a few weeks. Life passed around me as if I was watching it on TV. If I said something funny out of habit, I almost always laughed because it was like watching someone else say it.

  Officer Cruz looked just as bedraggled as I did. For some reason, that tired expression in those nearly black eyes of hers snapped something loose. It was a kinship of sorts. Like those knowing stones in Dakota’s eyes—an epiphany that I wasn’t alone in this. Something radical and wonderful filled my brain. I knew it was insane, like something you might see in a movie, but it just had to work. This was going to be the only way to save Jane. We had to take matters into our own hands. The system was going to put an innocent girl away for life, so we would have to get away from the system. We would have to go off the grid. Not only that, but we would need help. Kindred spirit type of help.

  I grabbed the guard by her shoulder, causing her to flinch out of her own reverie.

  “Officer Cruz, can I have a word with you?”

  Chapter Four: Irene

  For ten years they told me my baby girl was dead. Ten whole years, but I knew better. No one knew my Janie the way I knew her. She was smart, my girl. More than smart, my Janie was brilliant, and not just because I liked to brag. Well, I did like to brag about her, but even the principal of her school told me how exceedingly smart she was when he came to the funeral. I told him I would tell Janie he said so when she came home, and he looked at me that way people do nowadays.

  My girl first vanished from our home ten years ago without a trace. She had been playing in the backyard of our little house in Carrollton when a storm rolled in. It was one of those pop-up thunderstorms, the kind we get in the summer, and when I opened the back door to tell Janie to come inside, she wasn’t there. Not even a hairband blowing in the wind or a sock left behind. Janie had just vanished. Clouds towered above me in that threatening way thunderheads did. The air vibrated electric. I could smell it on the wind. Something had happened. There was a gap in the world where my Janie should have been, filled with only emptiness of everyday life.

  I looked everywhere. The terror, the utter and complete hopeless, immobilizing horror that consumes you when you can’t find your child is something every mother knows. They are by your side one second and then they aren’t. It’s like having a little piece of your soul walking around on the outside of your body where anyone can hurt it. When it’s lost, there is no comfort. None.

  We looked for Janie for months, and nothing came up. Rescue workers, policemen, volunteers, everyone seemed to huddle around our little hole in the world and try to help us fill it. I kept opening the door to my house, expecting to see her just walk up, twigs and dirt in her hair from getting lost in the wilderness behind our neighborhood. Is wasn’t much of a forest really, only by Texas standards, but it was enough to get lost in. She would be so hungry she’d eat a dozen cookies from the freezer before telling me her tale of survival. Then, I’d hug her and say I never gave up hope. That never happened.

  One year passed, and my husband wanted a funeral. The authorities had given up on a cold trail with no leads. A grief counselor had suggested a funeral would give us some closure.

  “Closure? On what?” I had told him. “Our daughter’s coming home.”

  We had the stupid funeral anyway and filled the small coffin with mementos and photographs. Her friends brought little things they wanted to give her. It was nice, but I took some of the trinkets Janie would have wanted and held onto them for when she came back. I told her friends as much, and they cried. Those tear-filled faces were dutifully shuffled away from me by their parents. Poor kids. They were only nine or ten. Janie’s age. They didn’t seem to understand she was coming back.

  My husband lost faith. That’s the best way to describe it. Such weakness some men have. I suppose women can have it too, but it’s so much more rare among mothers. When you’re a mother, you just don’t give up on your kid...ever. I knew my Janie. She was far too smart to just be gone forever. There was no way she’d let someone take her, and if they did, they’d have one big battle on their hands. My girl was strong and strong willed. She had inherited that from me.

  My girl was alive. She was hiding out somewhere, waiting for the perfect time to work her way back to me. Janie might have gotten lost, but she would come home. Heaven and Earth couldn’t keep us apart. I knew that. She knew that. Mothers and daughters know these things.

  After a while, my husband asked for a divorce. It was fine with me. Who would want to be married to such a specimen? Who gives up on your only daughter like that? Weak. That was the only word to describe such a person. Less than a person, really. He was a worm—a weak worm.

  The part I didn’t like was moving away from the house. I had no particular attachment to it except that it was where Janie had last known me to be. How would she find me in this new place? When she returned, she would find a different family in her home. That would simply be awful. I wanted to stay where my Janie could find me.

  In the end, my choice was taken away from me. My husband hired people who all worked together. I knew because they all had the same uniform with little logos on it. They packed up my things, and told me I was to go live with them in a big house near downtown, but I didn’t want to go. Besides, they hadn’t boxed up any of Janie’s things. I needed to have those items with me for the day she came back. Janie would want them.

  Everything got blurry the way it does when you can’t stop crying. Eventually, the people said I could take one box of Janie’s things with me. That was all the leeway I needed. I grabbed the largest box in the house because they hadn’t specified the size I could take, and I packed it with all her most important possessions. Almost everything fit, and I took pride in my ingenuity. I was a smart cookie, like my Janie.

  When they took me away, my worm husband hugged me goodbye. He was sobbing and apologizing, but I wouldn’t look at him. One didn’t suffer themselves to look upon worms. After my things were packed into a van, the people in the uniforms separated me from the worm. His tears had wet the lapel of my shirt. I looked down at it and then at him with nothing but scorn.

  “You cry like a person, but you are no person.”

  That’s when the people took me away to the big building downtown. Overall, it wasn’t a terrible place to live. The air-conditioner was not of the best quality, and the air smelled musty during those few weeks in Texas when you didn’t need the cold or the heat turned on, but it was clean all around, and they let me open my window when I liked. The other residents were odd. Some were genuinely crazy. Some were just sad. I had my own room overlooking the street, so that was nice. Everyone on my floor was allowed to wear his or her own clothes, so that was nice too. I heard the people on some of the other floors didn’t have as much freedom. Rumors said they didn’t even have windows.

  A few times a week, we met in group therapy. That’s what they called it anyway. If you asked me, it was a reason for a bunch of people to get together and whine. Molly, the red-headed manic girl, mourned the loss
of something different every time, and each occasion it was catastrophic. Whether it was a feather, a bow, or her grandmother, the emotion was the same. Ted wore eyeliner and never talked. He just moped all the time. Karlie the junkie was into stealing, and she used group therapy as an excuse to return everyone’s stolen items. It was all a game to get attention.

  Each of us endured the fake smiles of the counselor and the uncomfortable chairs we were given. It was a practice in patience and posture. Often I counted the little cracks on the walls near the pill counter. Foundation in Dallas was hell on walls and ceilings. Once, a big split in a doorway opened up. One of the orderlies had put a Band-Aid on it as a joke, but when the crack yawned wide enough for the Band-Aid to fall off, it stopped being funny. We were that crack. We all just kept breaking, and no quantity of Band-Aids would cover it up.

  Whenever anyone asked me anything, I just said I was grateful for what I had and what I knew. I had the knowledge my daughter would come back some day. The idea once had been that I knew she would come home to me, but this place wasn’t home. So, the thought morphed into a different one. Janie would come find me here, and we’d run away together. The thing was, she was a little girl, and I didn’t even know where I was anymore. How was she going to find me?

  I stopped wanting to eat anything for a while. The people in the uniforms tried to bring me different food, food I had once said I liked, but none of it tasted especially good to me. Noodles were bland and slithered around in my mouth like flavorless ribbons. They reminded me of worms, and then I couldn’t eat anymore at all. For the first time since she left, I started to doubt that my clever daughter would find me.

  Some group in different uniforms liked to bring in therapy animals once a month. They were mainly dogs, and when they came, Claudette in the room three doors over from me always shut herself in her room with her cat. Sylvester hated the dogs. Normally, I sided with the black-and-white tomcat, but one day, they brought this white poodle dog to us. I was sitting alone in a chair closest to the television, when this ugly thing waddled up to me. I hadn’t been eating much, so the whole room looked a bit odd, and my head felt too heavy for my neck. Everything sort of reverberated around my eyes. When I looked over and saw the little dog, I couldn’t help but smile. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen: his white curlicue fur and those tear-stained eyes. Could something be so ugly it was cute?